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The money quote for me: "The reason I call the approach I take to CSS utility-first is because I try to build everything I can out of utilities, and only extra

by Andrex 7y ago

The money quote for me: "The reason I call the approach I take to CSS utility-first is because I try to build everything I can out of utilities, and only extract repeating patterns as they emerge." I've been puzzling over the same "Separation of Concerns vs. Mixing Concerns" dichotomy ever since the rise of Bootstrap. Something about using Bootstrap's classes never felt right to me, but I was never happy with the amount of duplication in my traditional CSS either... I eventually settled on BEM, but that didn't 100% solve the issues either, and it seems to be getting left behind as the ecosystem gets older. The idea of starting with the Bootstrap-like functional CSS, and then compositing repeated patterns into components, definitely seems to have tremendous upsides... Looking forward to trying this methodology out in a future project.

inopinatus 7y ago
Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need. Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo. The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO[1]) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs and overloaded semantic class attributes, and everyone compiles their assets into a static file. I switched to Tailwind CSS months ago. Adam Wathan is the hero we deserve. [1] https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  As an aside, XSLT 1.0, based on DSSSL and created by its author (as is groff and SP SGML), is 20 years old to the date.

by Andrex 7y ago

inopinatus 7y ago

Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need. Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo. The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO[1]) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs and overloaded semantic class attributes, and everyone compiles their assets into a static file. I switched to Tailwind CSS months ago. Adam Wathan is the hero we deserve. [1] https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf

tannhaeuser 7y ago
As an aside, XSLT 1.0, based on DSSSL and created by its author (as is groff and SP SGML), is 20 years old to the date.